The invention relates to versatile furniture that easily converts between a pet friendly stairs, an ottoman like apparatus and/or independent seating.
In any household there are surfaces of different heights. Many people who have animals, such as dogs and cats, want to allow access to raised surfaces, such as couches and beds. While large animals in good physical condition can normally jump up to such surfaces, many animals because of smallness in size, age, or physical disability cannot make the jump between the floor and the raised surfaces and because of instability or pain in joints may find it difficult to jump down to the floor from the raised surface.
Furthermore, humans also sometimes have difficulty getting onto raised surfaces. For example, a person with bad knees or a leg injury may find it difficult to get into bed.
Previous attempts have been made to provide steps to both animals and persons to ease the task of climbing up or down with respect to a surface by providing a series of easy to scale incremental steps. Such steps have been problematic because they are often large fixed structures that take up a great deal of space, act as a tripping hazard when not in use, and fail to fit into the decor of a room. Some of these structures also have stability issues making them unsafe for use by pets or humans and/or have significant weight limitations and are designed for only small animals. Prior art steps have also often been cumbersome and/or very heavy, so as to be difficult to move.
A further problem with prior steps has been that such are not versatile. Most only provide a fixed stairway that cannot be adapted to positions in different configurations based upon surrounding furniture or structures or be used for other purposes, such as temporary seating or an end table or other furniture when not in use as a stairway.